Microsoft open sourcing its C++ library, Cloudera's open source data platform, new tools to remove leaked passwords on GitHub and combat ransomware, and more open source news

Catch up on the biggest open source headlines from the past two weeks.

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Opensource.com

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look Cloudera's open source data platform, Microsoft open sourcing its C++ library, new tools to beef up digital security, and more!

Cloudera releases open source cloud data platform

It was only a few months ago that data processing software vendor Cloudera went all in on open source. The results of that shift have started to appear, with the company releasing "an integrated data platform made up entirely of open-source elements."

Called Cloudera Data Platform, it combines "a cloud-native data warehouse, machine learning service and data hub, each running as instances within the self-contained operating environments." Cloudera's chief product officer Arun Murthy said that by using "existing components in the cloud, the platform cuts deployment times from weeks to hours." The speed of open source adoption is a great industry proof point. One can image the next step is Cloudera's participation in the underlying open source communities they now depend on.

Microsoft open sources its C++ standard library

When you think of open source software, programming language libraries probably aren't the first things that come to mind. But they're often an essential part of the software that we use. A team at Microsoft recognized the importance of the company's implementation of the C++ Standard Library (STL) and it's been released as open source.

By making the library open source, users get "easy access to all the latest developments in C++" and enables them to participate "in the STL’s development by reporting issues and commenting on pull requests." The library, which is under an Apache License, is available on GitHub.

Two new open source security tools

Nowadays, more than ever it seems, digital security is important to anyone using a computer — from average users to system administrators to software developers. Open source has been playing its part in helping make systems more secure, and two new open source tools to help secure an organization's code and its computers have been released.

If you, or someone in your company, has ever accidentally published sensitive information to a public GitHub repository, then Shhgit is for you. The tool, which you can find on GitHub, is designed to detect passwords, connection strings, and access keys that wind up being exposed. Unlike similar tools, you don't need to point Shhgit at a particular repository. Instead, it "taps into the GitHub firehose to automatically flag up leaked secrets".

Ransomware attacks are no joke, and defending against them is serious business. Cameyo, a company specializing in virtualization, has released an open source monitoring tool that "any organization can use to identify attacks taking place over RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) in their environment." Called RDPmon, the software enables users to "monitor and identify brute force attacks and to help protect against ransomware". It does this by watching the number of attempted RDP connections, along with the number of users and which programs those users are running.

New foundation to develop open source data processing engine

There's a new open source foundation in town. Tech firms Alibaba, Facebook, Twitter, and Uber have teamed up to further develop Presto, a database search engine and processing tool originally crafted by Facebook.

The Presto Foundation, which operates under the Linux Foundation's umbrella, aims to make Presto the "fastest and most reliable SQL engine for massively distributed data processing." One of the foundation members, Alibaba, already has plans for the tool. According to an article in CX Tech, Alibaba intends to refine Presto to more efficiently "sift through the mountains of data generated by its e-commerce platforms."